Leadership Lessons from Counter-insurgency Strategy (I didn't go looking but what I found was illuminating)
Love and War?
It may seem bizarre for someone who believes that the foundation of all leadership is unconditional love to be drawing lessons from military strategy, and counterinsurgency strategy at that—the darkest of the military arts. But a combination of coincidence and curiosity led me down what turned out to a fascinating path.
(and yes, the context for this ‘intellectual curiosity’ is the death, destruction, harm that we humans do to each other in the name of… well whatever word we might insert but it’s rare we hear one begin with L and end in OVE.
It was an unexpected exploration for me and I found there was more to see than my assumptions. I suspect that is always the case when we choose to look at something we have avoided, and that, yet again, serves as the bigger lesson for me, but perhaps you are also interested in what I saw when I looked more closely?)
It Started With a Boy. And a Pandemic.
It started with my son, home, completing the final year of his history degree from his attic bedroom.
Many stories this past year have started with my son, my husband, or our dog. We have been home together as work and school close down their physical locations and become we locked in our virtual worlds.
It’s been a joy for me to have them home, especially the youngest son with that bittersweet knowing these might be the final years he lives with us. Sad, for him, not to be in a community of his peers, but secretly gleeful at having him close.
And unexpectedly I find myself close to his study process as he submits those final essays and the much larger dissertation.
An Unexpected Avenue of Discovery
He loves to talk his ideas ‘out loud’; he says it helps him make sense of them, and mum is usually the most willing ear for this (second to the dog).
Partly I just love to listen (he’s the baby son after all), and, partly, I find myself fascinated by topics and ideas I’ve shunned for the better part of my half century of life—history never grabbed me the way it seems it have grabbed him; my intellectual brain went towards a present and future focus. Same capacity; different direction.
This final project was broadly in military history, and one of those threads colouring the background was the evolution of counter-insurgency strategy.
For him, this part was a ‘must do’ tick box for the literature review, he’s drawn to the real, not the theoretical, but something in it caught my attention and I found myself off down a whole rabbit warren of historians and strategicians attempting to make sense of, and create a framework for difficult situations. Usually extremely difficult situations—counter-insurgency, by definition, is conflict amongst a civilian population, the very ugly ‘wars' we see today, not the glorified battlefields of the old stories.
Not to Glorify War
I don’t want to diminish the relevance of lives lost and societies fractured, I hope that understanding will lead us away from war, even though I know this hope may be naively optimistic.
I know for my son, studying in detail events through the lens of time, the decision to go to war, and stay in war, looks very different from the way it might look to the person making a decision in the moment.
How we reconcile those perspectives is a question for another day, perhaps, but it has to be the backdrop of any discussion on the detail, in the same way there is a backdrop for any day-to-day decisions my clients might make.
How can we orient for good and in which direction will we find ‘better’?
Not easy questions but important ones.
The Universal Search
Context aside, I found a resonance with what might be a universal search to understand human behaviour. How to navigate the moral landscape, how to maintain integrity, where to draw lines and how to make meaning of something essentially senseless.
Although the circumstances are different, I find these are the questions we grapple with when we’re working to tackle ‘global' challenges’, often the work of the people I coach.
How to be our best, and do our best work when life is complex and sometimes difficult?
The answers don’t lie in the ‘strategy’ despite this body of literature being labelled so, they come in the way that we equip people and the fundamental beliefs we hold to be true.
Bumping Up Against My Assumptions
Suffice to say, I had a lot of assumptions about ‘military history’, but as I got deeper, I found the assumptions falling away.
It’s humbling whenever that happens—to realise that we are seeing our own assumptions rather than the depth of who we are. But I wouldn’t miss those million daily reminders.
What I read was by good people, writing intelligently, and thoughtfully, with love as a foundation, on topics about which many of us carry a lot of assumptions, me included.
Oriented to Good
Setting aside my assumptions, I could feel the heart and soul that shone through the dryness of the literature.
Admitting that it is difficult territory, where mistakes have been, and are being, made seems an obvious place to start but it does not negate a deep humanity, and that we are all oriented to good, even if we become a little trapped in the web of our own thinking.
Of course academic military historians do not speak in those words, but it’s obvious in the space between the words.
The only difference between one set of humans and another is the one I create in my mind and, once I got over myself, I became fascinated with the detail of the ideas shared.
Meaningful Impact
Those ideas, and where the connection came with the leadership work I do, was two-fold:
Firstly, the truly deep desire to understand something, and something that is complex and morally challenging. This is a familiar world for those of us who are active in international development, public policy, large scale ‘change’. There is no simple solution, and to understand helps us see potential, but it does not prescribe a path, because no prescription is ever ‘right’ and the search for one is a major distraction.
And the second point... In order to do this ^^^, we should not, therefore, prescribe, but equip. This is so very different from what I see in the leadership literature where it is the exception to stay away from prescription. Even explanatory frameworks seem to have a ‘better’ quadrant, a trajectory, something to aim for, to say nothing of the many models and systems. Yes it is informative to look at the past, to plan scenarios for the future, but from a foundation of knowing that we always have access to a powerful, in-the-moment responsive intelligence, and nurturing that intelligence is where ‘better’ decisions and wiser actions comes from.
Of course, we all like things that reinforce what we already think, and when something ‘strikes us’, it’s often bashing up against our conditioned thinking or assumptions—and so we notice the dissonance. I get that, obviously, and I see where I’m drawn to what fits my model of the world, and so I present it as that—my interpretation, not anything that you should take to be ‘true’.
1. ‘Understanding’ Versus ‘Good Idea’
It’s easy to go into a bookshop, read an email from a popular author, or pick up a recommendation from a podcast. But much of that realm falls into the ‘good idea’ box, something someone stumbled upon, or created, and then codified.
Sharing is fun, it’s the art of conversation, it’s entertaining to read someone else’s story, but there’s a fine line between sharing and advising, and it only takes a little enthusiasm for our idea for it to fall into the latter.
Although variable, of course, there was a lot of consistency between these practitioners and academics, to not lay out a way to do counter-insurgency better, but to attempt to understand how to more quickly achieve the political solution that is at the heart of any military conflict.
Setting aside those authors who were attempting to influence military policy, staying away from ‘how-to’ seems to open someone up to humility and a reverence for the limitations of what we know or what we think we can do.
Entertaining is not the same as understanding; learning to re-live or re-create someone else’s path is not the same as knowing the landscape; and knowledge of what they did should not replace our own contextual wisdom.
2. Equipping Not Instructing
Of course there are plenty of heuristics and how-tos laid out in military training, we see it in the movies, the repetition, training to react on autopilot. But, strategically, just as in the organisations I work with, people can be guided towards better ways of thinking in order to make that doing have more positive and meaningful impact.
Description Versus Prescription
It’s not surprising we see resonance between other worlds and our world—it’s the meaning of the word, right? So it’s not surprising that what caught my eye was another way of expressing what I think I am supporting people with.
We can’t possibly prescribe to people what they should do when they’re out in the ‘real world’. We can only equip them, and empower them, to do the very best they can.
Which is why I try to distinguish understanding from good idea (that worked for me), and description from prescription, and one of the reasons I enjoyed my rabbit warren.
How Not What
Ultimately there was an acceptance that the best we can do is train people for the ‘how’; show them where capacity comes from, where responsiveness and adaptability come from, and then empower them to do the very best they can in the circumstances they face.
Maybe that isn’t earth-shattering; maybe it reads like common sense, but time and again I come across individuals and organisations wanting the perfect solution to their particular challenge, and not realising that the solution does not lie where they think it does.
Understanding is way more powerful than prescription.
We all know this at some level but the challenges we face in the ‘real world’ whether we label them leadership, parenting, fitness, career, impact…we do a lot better when we see what’s in front of us, not our assumptions, and we get better at responding in real time.
Show up and respond to what shows up.
Laughably simple coaching advice from my mentor Michael Neill. But oh so relevant to everything we do. And paralleled, refreshingly, in the military literature—a lightness of touch and an avoidance of too much ‘telling people what to do’.
In soldiering as with coaching, we can master the craft, continually and deeply, again and again we immerse in it, and then we show up, and we respond to what shows up, trusting our capacity to do our best in the moment.
My Five-Step Process… (to be taken with a large pinch of salt)
So, if I was to offer advice…and oh how tempting to do so, it might be this.
Seek to understand.
Equip and empower yourself and the people in your organisation by guiding them to better thinking.
Show up.
Respond to what shows up.
Oh, and do it all from a foundation of unconditional love.
The Universal Lesson
And, yes, I realise that my insights are only relevant for me, and that something is ‘illuminating’ precisely because it makes the invisible visible, and shines a light on what is always there to be seen had we bothered to look.
Everything about the way the world looks to us, everything we think, everything we say or do, is a creation of our own ideas and assumptions. Once we see that, really see it, the implications become obvious, ‘we’ can get out of the way, and reactive thinking becomes a hindrance to wisdom.
And, we have an incredible capacity to both see through that thinking, and to create something new and wonderful in place of it. Whether that’s wonderful in terms of ‘what’ is created, or, increasingly important to me, wonderful in the sense of living life from a place of wonder and joy.
And, when we see more clearly, we might even come back around to that unconditional love thing.
With love,
Cathy